Finding and Using Moving Images In Context

The gap in weekly postings since earlier in July was caused by exigencies of National Endowment for the Humanities Preservation and Access: Humanities Collections and Resources proposal deadline. Yesterday we submitted “Finding and Using Moving Images in Context: Natural Resources, Communities, and Civic Engagement in New England.” The planned two-year project builds on lessons learned here:

• Work with interested scholars to build contextual materials
• Streamline video digitizing process
• Manage video library with networked open source tools
• Co-publish video with organizations having aligned interests
• Engage metadata specialists
• Foreground rights for users

The Project Description
Northeast Historic Film (NHF) has for more than 20 years collected archival moving images depicting changes in the New England environment illuminating natural resources, communities, and civic engagement in the 20th century. This project, between May 2009 and April 2011, will digitize 1,500 audiovisual records possessing great value for regional studies and broader scholarship, and will create free public access with contextual material for effective search, discovery, and reuse. Digital video access will be created in collaboration with scholars and partner organizations engaged in humanities research and publication. Metadata specialists will ensure that our descriptive tools adhere to contemporary standards. For the first time, researchers will have access to the objects as digital video with attached related information. Creating finding aids and direct access to the largest repository of regional moving images in the U.S. changes the model for finding and using moving images with relevant materials. Moving Images in Context, the digital video Website developed in this project, will support scholarly research and writing, classroom teaching, and public use.

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NHF’s collections of local television news, significant amateur, government, and independent works, all grounded in northern New England, are not elsewhere preserved or accessible, and are of demonstrated documentary value. The collections were almost entirely donated to the archives by the creator, home community, or generating institution and have accompanying documentation that supports study and understanding. Footage providing primary source materials on conditions in New England throughout the 20th century is exemplified by the Ernest G. Stillman Collection of lumber cutting and sawmill operations and details of coastal herring fisheries; the Dennison Collection and others documenting the culture of urban “sports” and hired professional Maine Guides in the forests and on rivers and lakes; the cultural history of summer camps, drawing on an NHF curated public screening at the Portland Museum of Art, with material from Wohelo-The Luther Gulick Camps from the 1920s; collections centered on small boatyards building recreational vessels and the industrial Bath Iron Works building ships for national defense.

Project scholars from the fields of political, cultural, and environmental history, film history and media studies, New England studies and comparative regional studies, along with professionals in lifelong learning and digital access, will help direct the digital library construction. Our Archival Storage Consortium partner, Edmund S. Muskie Archives at Bates College, will contribute 75 hours of analog videotape for digitization and will catalog 100 items from NHF related to Senator Edmund Muskie, whose long career included authorship of the federal Clean Water Act.

Products

• 1,500 individual video items newly digitized from 1,000 access videotapes—for the first time attached to their catalog records. The newly digitized clips will be offered as streaming video from University of Maine servers, accessed by the public in searchable databases.
• Creation of a new Website for the digital library, built with OpenCollection, a freely available open source collections management tool used by the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin, Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology in Berkeley, CA, and the National September 11th Memorial Museum, ensuring a community of practice.
• An explicit rights component ensuring that NHF as custodian pursues a transparent process with donors and depositors, expressing respect for the preserved materials and for their origins.
• Video in exhibits created with the Maine History Online project at Maine Historical Society, their project scholars and curators ensuring an appropriate humanities framework for co-publication.